


as to what ails mister silver

by Askance



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Creature Fic, Emetophobia, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: Howell is a simple man. He is good at cauterizing wounds and cutting off limbs and not much else, comforting the sick or letting them die with dignity, and there has never been much room for wonder in the world he occupies—only the momentary thrill of gunfire and the roar of victorious men—but here is a wonder, and he fears for it.





	as to what ails mister silver

**Author's Note:**

> To be read alongside [no-one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12695226).

_As to what ails Mister Silver,_ he writes, _I am at a Loss. Certainly there is Infection of the Limb for which I am doing my Utmost; and the ensuing Fever, to be expected; but I cannot account for so enduring a Delirium, or the Emotional Torment he suffers. Every Man for whom I have performed Amputation has grieved It of course but none for so long and so deeply, nor so violently—my Arms profuse with Scratches delivered by Mister Silver when I have attempted to touch him—we have learned to touch him only when he is Fully Unconscious, else he lashes out—_

Howell puts down his pen, rests his elbows on the table, rests his face in his hands, for just a moment.

In the warship’s cabin he is the only one awake: below the window lies Mister Silver, unconscious as he has been since early that morning; Howell is on the night watch for him, as he requested for himself. It is easier to maneuver the young man’s fevered, aching, restless body, to wash it, tend to it, cover and uncover it, when he is dead to the world, and Howell takes it as a good sign that he has become mostly reticent at night, as if his body is remembering the movement of time as it used to be, before.

There will always be a _before_ for him now, Howell knows, just as there was for Randall, just as there would have been for Mister Duffy the day they took Parrish’s ship, had Howell been quick enough. A before and an after: wholeness and unwholeness, able and unable.

For a minute he looks at his patient across the cabin by the meagre, dying light of the whale oil lamp at his elbow. Silver is mostly still, only moving occasionally in the jerks and shudders of sleeping men. His temperature spiked that morning and began to lower rapidly a while after nightfall. Howell could feel the difference on the palm of his hand even inches away from Silver’s skin.

_His Fever is strange and seems to Fluctuate, as if on a Schedule of its own for which I cannot account. We can only hope that it breaks and soon._

It’s been two days since Howell’s tools bit into Silver’s flesh, two days since Silver first lost consciousness and went into shock. Last night Howell finally gained a semblance of control over this cabin-cum-sick bay, ordering crewmen out, barring the room to anyone save the Captain; everyone had been anxious for news, poking their heads in and out, driving Howell mad. He is only a ship’s doctor, but even he has a sense of his patient’s decency, and he knows that Silver—raving and delirious at worst, uncanny and immobile at best—wouldn’t want to be seen like this. Not until the fever breaks. Not until he is something of himself again.

Muldoon has day watch, because he knows to keep his hands to himself and his trap shut, and Howell has nights, and save soft noises of unknowing distress from his patient, his only interruption tonight has been the Captain, who ducked his head in to ask if there had been any change, and was gone just as quickly.

Howell’s head is still ringing with the noise of cannon-fire on Charleston. He is glad that Silver can sleep; he certainly cannot.

He rubs his eyes and picks his pen up again, smoothing out the unwritten bottom edges of his ledger with his fingertips.

_The Wound will ooze and weep some Days more I imagine but beyond that Pray God we are out of the Worst of it._

He gets up, takes the oil lamp in one hand, and moves with seaman’s grace across the slowly rocking floor of the cabin.

In the light Silver’s forehead is beaded with sweat—nothing new—Howell pulls his filthy handkerchief from his sleeve and dabs it gently away, smoothing dark wet strands of hair back against the pillow. Silver is breathing open-mouthed, his eyelids twitching, his hands resting limp on the tick mattress to either side of his body.

Howell pulls the lamp across the length of him, past the God-given calm of his naked chest to the place where the blankets are pulled up to cover his modesty and his missing limb. Gently, he lifts the end of the blanket and shines the light on the soaked, rust-and-brown bandages wrapped around what is left of Silver’s leg; they will have to be changed, Howell thinks, and turns to retrieve his kit from the table where his ledger lies.

There is a soft, pained noise behind him, and Howell turns back.

Silver’s head fidgets on the pillow, his closed eyes tightening, and his hand twitches, and Howell sits back down beside him, placing the oil lamp carefully at his feet on the rocking floorboards. He folds Silver’s hand into his own, squeezing it reassuringly, reaching his handkerchief over into the bucket of water beneath the cot. He wets it, wrings it with one hand, lays it over Silver’s eyes; rivulets trickle down toward his ears, and he goes still, his breath falling into rhythm again.

“Alright, mate,” Howell murmurs, and releases Silver’s fingers, which have gone limp on the tick again.

He sleeps, if not peacefully, then at least soundly, as Howell unwinds the bandages on his stump, bathes it with water and alcohol, notes the creeping red of inflammation and feels the infected heat with his hand, judges it, wraps it up again, in clean white strips of fabric that will soon be run through with blood and pus but for now look secure, comfortable.

He feels for Silver’s fever again—it is still falling, but has not yet broken—and then moves away, back to the table to close his ledger, to sit in his chair and try for a moment’s sleep before the morning.

 

* * *

 

 

_A Development yet not one which I am willing to report to the Captain. Mister Silver is ill in a way I have not seen—_

Muldoon comes running not long after midday, and Howell tries not to countenance the stares and worried murmurs of the crew as he rushes back to the cabin to find Silver with his head thrown back, choking.

“I tried to wake him but he don’t know me none—”

“Go and get me fresh water,” Howell says, spinning poor Muldoon and forcing him back out the door, closing it for good measure. Silver’s face is flushed, his fever back with a vengeance, and there is a thin slit of white eye showing between his eyelids. His body is heaving, and Howell snatches the bucket of water and dumps it unceremoniously onto the floor, holds it beneath the edge of the cot.

He takes a breath, reaches up, turns the boy’s head, and forces two fingers past Silver’s teeth and into his throat.

The reaction is immediate, and Howell winces as he pulls his hand away, not fast enough to avoid altogether what he expects to be vomitus—it misses the bucket almost entirely, soaking the edge of the cot, Howell’s shoes, the floorboards, and Howell braces for the familiar smell of bile until he realizes that there isn’t any.

Silver coughs, moans, and Howell sits, unsure what has just happened, knowing only that whatever Silver has just vomited isn’t vomit.

The smell isn’t acidic; it isn’t bile; it’s familiar, strong, but familiar. It’s sea water.

It takes him only a moment to understand what must have happened, and, furious, Howell settles Silver’s head sideways in case it comes up again and storms out of the cabin, grabbing the waiting Muldoon by the collar and hefting the little man up against the wall.

“Who the fuck gave him salt water?” he shouts. “Do you know what that could do to a man in his state?”

Muldoon is wide-eyed, holding his hands up in defense. “Salt water? Ain’t none of us brought him sea water, we’d never—he ain’t drunk since this morning and that fresh—I swear it—”

Howell deflates as quickly as he’d erupted, letting Muldoon drop the inch back to the floor, and Muldoon looks between him and the cabin, and Howell says, “Go on.”

He scurries away, back to the mess with his crewmates, and for a moment Howell stands there in the hall, looking at the sliver of open door behind him.

He reaches down, picks up the bucket of fresh water Muldoon had set there, and goes back in, stepping tentatively, unsure whether or not he _wants_ Silver to be awake for him. Thank God, he isn’t, though he looks as though he might vomit again, and Howell crouches down next to him, smoothes his hair back to wait for it.

He feels a curious and troubled flutter in his chest, almost like fear. He should have known—no one would have given him salt water to drink. These men are cruel, but not to their own. Not to this man.

He cannot imagine where it came from.

Silver vomits only once more, and it is hardly anything, and Howell catches it in the bucket, then eases him back into a comfortable position, wiping his mouth clean, feeling the catch and drag of salt crusted on his lips and frowning.

He takes the rest of Muldoon’s watch right into his own, and doesn’t move from the bedside except to write it in his ledger, the strangeness. Troubled, he watches Silver sleep until far into the night.

 

 

* * *

 

There is no more sea water in Mister Silver’s stomach, but the longer they sail, the farther from Charleston they go, the worse Silver seems to get, and Howell is at a loss for what to do, except to stay by him, keep him still, hydrated, clean. He holds him down when the ship strikes a storm and the violence of the waves sends Silver into a fit, watches helplessly as Silver’s convulsing fingers scratch and scrape deep gouges into the hull of the ship beside him, his head flung toward the wall, his throat full of desperate whimpers and moans, as if scrabbling to get out.

His fever spikes and fades, and in his exhaustion Howell thinks that it is moving with the tides, though that is impossible and foolish, and he would never reason that, not as a doctor, a man of sound mind. He watches Silver’s flesh wax hot, burning red to pale, bluish cold, so cold sometimes that he begins to worry and heaps more blankets on him, constantly daubing sweat away or lifting his head up to drink. It is a constant dance, trying to keep him comfortable and still, trying to keep his wound from festering, eyeing constantly the state of the infection. Muldoon relieves him once or twice, but Howell is a man of duty, and he has always liked Mister Silver, and he cannot get the smell of sea water out of his mind. They promised they would care for him; this is all he can do.

He doesn’t tell Flint about the sea water, though the captain looks in once or twice a day to ask about his patient, more and more as the days go on. Flint is worried; he can tell. He begins to wonder if it was his imagination after all. He has had so little sleep, after all. He cannot let his fancy run away from him.

 

 

* * *

 

But then—

_He began to Choke again not long after six Bells and I prepared for more Vomitus, but though I attempted to Induce as I had done Before nothing occurred, and it seemed to me that Mister Silver’s Face was quite Blue, as if his Choking were troubled Breathing—indeed there was no Breath, and alarmed at this I uncovered his Throat to identify a Blockage, but there was None—I could hear Terrible Strain and his Body heaved. I uncovered his Chest and saw Clearly the problem, for wondrous as it is it appeared that Mister Silver had sprouted Gills, and could not Breathe through them._

He knows it is mad. Later, in writing, he nearly crosses it out, scribbles it into nothing, but he knows what he saw.

Beneath the blanket, fanning open and shut desperately, long open slits along Silver’s ribs, exactly like the gills of every fish Howell had ever butchered for Randall or held in his hands or seen dying in a net. They sent him into almost a kind of panic, and his first instinct was to hold them shut, to make them disappear, this unknowable anomaly, but Silver was choking for want of breath and not for the first time Howell did not know what to do.

“Wake up,” he said, hoping somehow that waking would shock Silver back into it, but Silver couldn’t hear him, and the gills were straining horribly under Howell’s hands, and he thought he too might be sick, feeling that cold, sentient flesh—he turned his face away, let go, stood up, gripped the sides of his head in both hands, looking down—should he call the Captain? Douse the boy in water? Close them—wish them away—pray? He didn’t know—nothing, nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for something like this—

Again the slits of visible eye beneath Silver’s lids, but this time—madness—black, slick and black, like a shark’s eyes—

Silver gave a rattling gasp, and suddenly the gills were gone, vanished back into his skin as if they had never been, and for the first time since he fell away under Howell’s knife his eyes opened all the way, and they were bright blue and human and the long, desperate exhale Silver gave was almost as full of relief as the doctor’s.

Silver’s eyes met his, for just an instant, before he fainted away again, and Howell stood there, heart pounding, staring at the smooth unblemished flesh of his ribs, the rise and fall of human lungs.

Howell turned to the empty bucket on the floor and was violently sick.

 

* * *

 

 

_What is he?_

_Today the Men elected him Quartermaster by unanimous Vote. Mine was among Them. I am too much in Confusion to allow what I have seen to yet Sway my duty to this Ship. The Captain took me aside and asked after our Friend and I did not tell him All, or even Part, for I cannot read the Man and have never been able to. I do not know what he would do to such an Interloper. What he is I cannot say. Today upon bathing his Face and Neck I glimpsed Sharp White Teeth within his Mouth, gone again the Moment I chanced a Second Look._

_What is he? I am not Afraid of him. He is in Pain and Distress. He does not know where he is or what he Suffers. I do not know if what I have seen was Given to me or merely Allowed by Providence._

_He is my Patient and I will look after him as I have Pledged for he is still our Crewman and a Good One. There is time for Answers later—_

* * *

 

 

They are all ashore in Tortuga when the fever finally breaks, and Howell is the only one to see it, to feel the heat of Silver’s skin settle into what feels like the temperature of Howell’s own, and he could almost weep with relief. He has seen men survive amputations before, in all degrees, rallying like lions or barely clawing through with the last of their will; he has seen men die from much less, in his arms and under his knife, and he realizes only now as the worst is over how afraid he was of losing this particular man.

It is hard to say why. He watches Silver sleep his first easy sleep in a week.

Now, bathing his arms and chest with a wet cloth, Howell carefully ignores the tinges of blue and grey that bloom and vanish like bruises across the young man’s flesh, the patches of skin that emerge rough and shiny like scales beneath his hands and then disappear just as quickly. Once, Howell watched a snake shed its skin—that is what this feels like—as if Silver’s body is in two minds about what it is, as if something inside him is pushing at the surface, trying to decide what to be, where to go.

The wall of the cabin to Silver’s right is scoured with scratches; Howell gently pulls splinters out from beneath his fingernails. The windows are shut. When the sea breeze blows in it seems to make Silver fitful.

Once they have weighed anchor and are sailing back toward Inagua, Howell dates and signs his ledger, and sits for a moment, alone in the cabin with the thing that, until recently, he had considered a man; and then he stands, and goes out to find the captain.

 

* * *

 

 

“Has he woken?”

“The fever is broken. But he’s sleeping. Best not to wake him.”

Flint stands beside him, looking down at John Silver in the quiet of the warship cabin.

His temperature has settled enough that Howell has dressed him, at last, in clothes offered by the men, and he seems to be sleeping soundly, his brow finally free of sweat, his face finally relaxed.

“You wouldn’t lie to me about something like this,” Flint says, fixing Howell with his gaze.

Howell can’t read him. Doesn’t know how to begin. He tries not to fidget with the handkerchief in his hands. He is afraid, not so much of Silver himself, but of what Flint might do to him, knowing that something isn’t right, that there is yet another and perhaps more sinister lie to the cook’s identity that they had not yet known.

Howell doesn’t answer; he crouches down instead, gently lifts up the blanket, raises Silver’s brown shirt with one hand.

As if rising to his touch, he watches blue-green color flower over Silver’s skin, dissolve and fade away. He rests his fingers against a large patch of what are, he knows now, unmistakeably the scales of something that comes from the sea, thin and fragile, rippling across the flesh above Silver’s dark left nipple and up over his collarbone.

He glances back. Flint’s face is stony, as usual, but he catches something there, a flicker of unease.

“For a few days,” Howell says softly, standing back up, “all over him, that.”

“You saw—”

“I saw,” Howell says, “I saw gills, sir. Thank God they’ve not opened again. I know what I saw.”

Flint is silent.

 “Sir,” Howell says, and in that there is something more unspoken, something pleading.

Howell is a simple man. He is good at cauterizing wounds and cutting off limbs and not much else, comforting the sick or letting them die with dignity, and there has never been much room for wonder in the world he occupies—only the momentary thrill of gunfire and the roar of victorious men—but here is a wonder, and he fears for it.

“Have you told anyone else?” Flint says, and it’s not what Howell expects.

“No, sir. None but you.”

Flint nods.

“Tell me something,” he says, half-turning for the door. “That this is him, that he’s—something. Something that confounds us.”

“Sir?”

“Why am I not fucking surprised?” says Flint.

 

 

* * *

 

Within sight of Inagua, Silver wakes.

Truly wakes. His eyes open and they are clear, and the first thing they light upon is Howell, sitting dutifully on his stool just after sunset, lamps swinging overhead, and the windows cracked just barely, to let fresh air into the sick-room.

He doesn’t move to sit up, for which Howell is glad—he hasn’t the energy to help him. But he doesn’t speak either, and something about that unsettles him—no _where are we, what happened, how long was I—_ nothing.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Howell says, but any humor that might have been in his voice is dampened with a curious dread he cannot put a name to.

Silver blinks, and Howell realizes he is not smiling that usual easy smile that he has come to associate with the cook—he seems almost _too_ clear-headed, too lucid, his bright eyes boring holes directly into Howell’s head, and he feels an urge to lean back.

A curious thought comes into his head.

_Perhaps he should have been afraid._

“How do you feel?” he says weakly.

Silver looks at him a moment longer, his gaze uncanny, unfamiliar, and Howell is struck with a sudden realization that he does not know this person.

When next he blinks, the eyes that appear are round and black, like a shark’s eyes, and Howell doesn’t have time to react.

Silver’s hand shoots up from where it had been lying on the bed, and grips Howell’s chin in fingers that are far too strong to belong to a man so weak, and he pulls Howell forward viciously down toward him.

What he does is not a kiss.

He fastens his mouth on Howell’s mouth the way a leech might fasten to a bare leg, the way a lamprey might fasten to a shark, and Howell feels a horrible pulling at the inside of his head, down past his eyes, as if Silver is breathing straight out of his skull, inhaling him, consuming him, and he can feel Silver’s chest expanding with that breath, feels dizzy, sees bright and colorful spots popping and vanishing on the edges of his vision, and he feels something slipping, the smell of sea water, the colors green and grey blossoming on skin, the cold fluttering of gills, and then he is in the warship cabin, sitting on the stool beside John Silver’s bedside, and the new quartermaster is asleep, sound asleep, has been asleep for hours, unmoving except for the dreaming motion of his eyes, and Howell’s mouth tastes full of salt, and he cannot for the life of him remember why.

 

* * *

 

 

_Mister Silver is in good Condition and the Captain is with him waiting for him to Wake. When he does I expect there to be Rejoicing. I know I shall be quite Happy to have seen him through It. I am Glad though to be Quit of that Room. I am Uneasy there of Late and cannot Reason this. Of Mister Silver I am Uneasy too and of the Captain. I will be Happy to reach Home and clear my Head of all this. It has been a Trial on us all._

_I find that many Pages of my Ledger of this last Week are illegible to me and this is Curious. I have been Writing while quite Exhausted, and occupied with my Patient. This is the Reason, perhaps._

 


End file.
